Unsupervised Deep Transfer Learning for Intelligent Fault Diagnosis: An Open Source and Comparative Study

Recent progress on intelligent fault diagnosis has greatly depended on the deep learning and plenty of labeled data. However, the machine often operates with various working conditions or the target task has different distributions with the collected data used for training (we called the domain shift problem). This leads to the deep transfer learning based (DTL-based) intelligent fault diagnosis which attempts to remit this domain shift problem. Besides, the newly collected testing data are usually unlabeled, which results in the subclass DTL-based methods called unsupervised deep transfer learning based (UDTL-based) intelligent fault diagnosis. Although it has achieved huge development in the field of fault diagnosis, a standard and open source code framework and a comparative study for UDTL-based intelligent fault diagnosis are not yet established. In this paper, commonly used UDTL-based algorithms in intelligent fault diagnosis are integrated into a unified testing framework and the framework is tested on five datasets. Extensive experiments are performed to provide a systematically comparative analysis and the benchmark accuracy for more comparable and meaningful further studies. To emphasize the importance and reproducibility of UDTL-based intelligent fault diagnosis, the testing framework with source codes will be released to the research community to facilitate future research. Finally, comparative analysis of results also reveals some open and essential issues in DTL for intelligent fault diagnosis which are rarely studied including transferability of features, influence of backbones, negative transfer, and physical priors. In summary, the released framework and comparative study can serve as an extended interface and the benchmark results to carry out new studies on UDTL-based intelligent fault diagnosis. The code framework is available at https://github.com/ZhaoZhibin/UDTL.